ABSTRACT
One has the impression that “identity” is the most widely used concept these days in the social sciences and humanities from which it has passed into popular discourse. In academic sociology, where it is probably most ubiquitous, entire sessions at the annual meetings carry titles like “Identity Construction and Representation” or “Culture and Identity: Selves in Western Culture-History,” both real examples. A sociology editor at a leading university press told me the other day that she was swamped with manuscripts entitled the “social construction of...” this or that, from which one readily concludes that “The Social Construction of Identity” serves as an all-purpose title in current sociology, closely approximated indeed by the first session title cited above. If one could work in a reference to “culture,” as in the second example above, one would have covered just about all of the major catchwords that pervade the discourse of social science and social criticism today. “Culture” is, of course, of more ancient provenance than “identity” and “social construction,” but it has recently been revived as an all-encompassing label for nearly anything and everything human beings do in association, although half a century ago when I first encountered sociology as a student the field’s most advanced practitioners were severe critics of its use as a blanket monocausal term borrowed from anthropology.
